The Yakima Sun Kings were a resilient minor league basketball outfit that plodded along for nearly two decades in Central Washington state. The team won the championship of the Continental Basketball Association fives times: 1995, 2000, 2003, 2006 & 2007.

During the Sun Kings’ hey day in the mid-1990’s, the CBA was the Official Developmental League of the National Basketball Association and Yakima was a legitimate destination for former NBA draft picks and other fringe pros battling to make it back to the NBA, or to earn contracts in Europe or Asia.

Playing in a small, low-income market with a limited corporate support base, the Sun Kings had several near-death experiences over the years and actually went out of business not once, but twice. The first shut down was in February 2001 when NBA Hall-of-Famer Isaiah Thomas’ disastrous $9 million dollar buyout of the entire league ended in the league’s bankruptcy after 18 months of hubris and ineptitude.

After a season without pro basketball at the SunDome in the winter of 1991-92, local investors revived the Sun Kings in 2002. By this time, though, the Continental Basketball Association itself was in existential crisis. The NBA launched its own proprietary developmental league in 2001 – the NBA D-League. The CBA was no longer essential to the NBA and no longer the beneficiary of a seven-figure annual subsidy from the senior league.

In 2005 the Yakama Indian Nation purchased the Sun Kings from the Uceny family for the fire sale price of $140,000. During the final three years of the franchise’s existence, the Sun Kings were known as “Yakama” instead of “Yakima”, in tribute to the Indian Nation and its preferred spelling.

That figure was evidence of the CBA’s decrepitude and increasing irrelevance – fifteen years earlier, the original Sun Kings came to Washington from Topeka, Kansas in a $550,000 sale and in early 1992, minority investor and General Manager Brooks Ellison acquired an option to purchase the club from original owner Bob Wilson for $1 million. Nevertheless, even at $140K, the purchase of a minor league basketball team caused dissension and recriminations within the leadership of the Yakama Nation.

After three seasons of red ink, the Nation pulled the plug on the Sun Kings once and for all in April 2008.

Midway through the Storm’s second season in the 2003-04, former University of Michigan star and NBA All-Star Chris Webber became a part-owner of the team. Webber’s former “Fab Five” teammate at Michigan, Jimmy King, played for the Storm that season too.

Doomed, totally forgotten minor league basketball effort that flamed out in Baltimore after a couple of months in early 1979. The Baltimore Metros formed a year earlier in Washington, D.C. in the Eastern Basketball Association. The Metros were terrible in the EBA (5 wins against 26 losses) and team owner Fred Keller moved the club to the University of Maryland Baltimore County Fieldhouse for the 1978-79 season. The EBA also re-branded itself as the Continental Basketball Association that year.

Keller hired ABA and NBA veteran Larry Cannon to coach the team. Cannon, the #5 overall pick in the 1969 NBA draft, got the team off to a 9-5 start. But that wasn’t good enough for Keller, who fired him in December and took the coaching reigns himself. By January, the club was out of money and Keller was looking to unload it. The CBA threatened to revoke the franchise for unpaid bills. In late January, the Metros abruptly left town and set up shop in Utica, New York, changing their name to the “Mohawk Valley Thunderbirds” in midseason. That didn’t work out either and the Metros/Thunderbirds eventually went out of business without finishing the 1978-79 regular season.

The third time was not the charm for Alabama businessman Tom McMillan, who experienced little but heartburn and red ink after buying into the minor league Continental Basketball Association in the summer of 1989. McMillan purchased the Pensacola Tornados that year and operated the club in Florida for two more seasons before soft attendance compelled him to move CBA franchise closer to home for the 1991-92 campaign.

But McMillan’s re-named Birmingham Bandits played in an outdate state fairgrounds neighborhood in a rough neighborhood and were a big loser at the box office. Barely a year after moving from Florida, McMillan was looking for yet another new home and he found one when a group of investors from Rochester, Minnesota offered to take on 30% of the team if he moved his CBA franchise to the small southeastern Minnesota city. It was a dubious proposition. The CBA had already tried and failed in Rochester just a few years earlier, when the Rochester Flyers (1987-1989) folded up shop after only two seasons.

In Minnesota the team took on the name Rochester Renegade (yes, singular) and adopted a feathered cap and sabre for its new logo, apparently taking after the legend of Robin Hood. Maybe this was a clever inside joke among McMillan and his new local investors: by now McMillan had to know that owning a CBA team was a swift and efficient way for the rich to be liberated of their wealth.

Under Head Coach Ron Ekker the 1992-93 Rochester Renegade were historically awful. The team finished 6-50, which was the worst record in the 47-year history of the league. As bad as they fared in the standings though, the 1992-93 Renegade team featured several players would later make it to (or get back to) the National Basketball Association, including Elliott Perry, Tony Farmer and Ronnie Grandison (pictured on the team’s 1992-93 program, above right).

McMillan’s local partners quickly backed away from the artistic and financial catastrophe unfolding at Rochester’s Mayo Civic Center, leaving McMillan holding the bag by himself as an absentee owner. He decided to give the team one more shot in Rochester. For the 1993-94 season, the team added an “s” to their name and became the more conventional-sounding Rochester Renegades.

McMillan paid former Minnesota Timberwolves head coach Bill Musselman $175,000 – a fortune in CBA money – to come in and turn around his team on the court. In addition to his NBA experience, the hyper-intense Musselman was a legend in the CBA. During the mid-1980’s he won four straight league championships from 1985 to 1988 as coach of the Tampa Bay Thrillers and Albany Patroons franchises.

Musselman worked his magic again, re-making the 6-50 Rochester team of the year before into a 31-25 playoff club. Ronnie Grandison returned for a second season and was named the CBA’s Most Valuable Player. But despite a big increase in percentage terms, Rochester’s ticket sales of 2,200 per game were still among the worst in the league and McMillan lost a reported half million dollars during the 1993-94 season. Late in the year he began talking with potential buyers in St. Paul, Massachusetts and Mississippi.

Finally, after five seasons and three cities, Tom McMillan unloaded his sinking CBA investment at the fire sale price of $350,000 to a real estate broker from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in May 1994. The Renegade moved East and became the Harrisburg Hammerheads for the 1994-95 CBA season. The real estate man quickly ran out of money and the franchise went out of business in February 1995 without managing to complete the season in Harrisburg.

==In Memoriam==

Former Renegades Head Coach Bill Musselman died on May 5, 2000 of heart and kidney failure after a series of ailments. He was 59.

The Savannah Spirits were a were a brief entry in the minor league Continental Basketball Association for two winters in the mid-1980’s. The team originated in Detroit in 1982 and won a CBA title in 1983, but struggled for relevance in the Motor City thanks to competition from the NBA’s Detroit Pistons.

The Detroit Spirits final owner was a man named Reginald Henderson who owned a blood testing laboratory. He continued to run the Spirits as an absentee owner after moving the team to Georgia in April of 1986.

The Savannah Spirits were undistinguished on the court, failing to make the playoffs their first year and losing in the opening round their second. But the team had a great line-up of characters, including the gonzo Chaucer scholar-turned-basketball coach Charley Rosen and former Georgia Tech star Tico Brown, who was the Crash Davis of the CBA. Brown would play the last two seasons of his long minor league career in Savannah and finish as the CBA’s all-time leading scorer (8,538 points). The Spirits’ 24-year old radio play-by-play man in Savannah was Craig Kilborn, later of Sportscenter, The Daily Show and Old School fame.

According to Rosen’s memoir Crazy Basketball: A Life In and Out of Bounds, Henderson was indicted and jailed during the Savannah Spirits’ second season for defrauding the federal government at his blood labs. At the end of that season, in June of 1988, the team was sold off to an Oklahoma convenience store kingpin who moved the team to Tulsa, where it became known as the Tulsa Fast Breakers.

The former Spirits franchise went through several more sales , name changes and relocations over the next decade, roaming the continent from North Dakota to Mexico City. Eventually the team landed in San Diego where it finally ran out of money and closed down in January 1996.